Sunday, August 20, 2006
Monkey Man
Hi Fellas!
Wow - I leave this page alone for 24 hours and return to find a learned discussion on cosmology already i
n progress.
Dinky - although I find your idea about time reversal as an assistance to storytelling a little far-fetched, I do know of one example where this has actually happened. The Specials 1979 track Monkey Man was written as a tribute to Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown. However, the Stone Roses were all but unheard of until about 1984, as far as I'm aware, and Brown himself would have been barely 16 in 1979. Hence, The Specials probably first encoun
tered Brown sometime during the mid-1980s and decided to retrospectively release Monkey Man some 5 years earlier. The track itself hints at this:
"I never saw you, I only heard of you, huggin up the big monkey man"
Obviously, they had never seen Brown in 1979, but they had somehow heard of him - allowing the production of track. And if we are, perhaps understandably, unbelieving, they assure us that:
"It's no lie, it's no lie, Them a tell me, You huggin up the big monkey man"
Why they would choose to release a song five or so years earlier than the actual date of composition is unclear. Perhaps they had an urgent gas bill to pay and needed five years of royalties immediately.
The same argument could be made for the Rolling Stones even earlier song, also entitled Monkey Man, which was released in 1969. The lyrical evidence, however, is inconclusive.
*Amazingly*, no one seems to have picked up on all this.
Anyway, Dinky, I recommend you get in touch with the Specials immediately.
I'm not quite sure where we're going with this blog, but I'm satisfied enough so far. We've not yet posted any of the trendy political comment, recipe ideas, knitting patterns, cat or baby photos found on other blogs, but I'm confident we'll provide this kind of stuff soon.
Wow - I leave this page alone for 24 hours and return to find a learned discussion on cosmology already i
n progress.Dinky - although I find your idea about time reversal as an assistance to storytelling a little far-fetched, I do know of one example where this has actually happened. The Specials 1979 track Monkey Man was written as a tribute to Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown. However, the Stone Roses were all but unheard of until about 1984, as far as I'm aware, and Brown himself would have been barely 16 in 1979. Hence, The Specials probably first encoun
tered Brown sometime during the mid-1980s and decided to retrospectively release Monkey Man some 5 years earlier. The track itself hints at this:"I never saw you, I only heard of you, huggin up the big monkey man"
Obviously, they had never seen Brown in 1979, but they had somehow heard of him - allowing the production of track. And if we are, perhaps understandably, unbelieving, they assure us that:
"It's no lie, it's no lie, Them a tell me, You huggin up the big monkey man"
Why they would choose to release a song five or so years earlier than the actual date of composition is unclear. Perhaps they had an urgent gas bill to pay and needed five years of royalties immediately.
The same argument could be made for the Rolling Stones even earlier song, also entitled Monkey Man, which was released in 1969. The lyrical evidence, however, is inconclusive.
*Amazingly*, no one seems to have picked up on all this.
Anyway, Dinky, I recommend you get in touch with the Specials immediately.
I'm not quite sure where we're going with this blog, but I'm satisfied enough so far. We've not yet posted any of the trendy political comment, recipe ideas, knitting patterns, cat or baby photos found on other blogs, but I'm confident we'll provide this kind of stuff soon.
# posted by Hugo @ 8:54 pm 
